This disclosure relates generally to advertising via social networking systems, and more specifically to selecting advertisements for presentation to social networking system users.
A social networking system, or other suitable online system, allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system provides an ideal forum for advertisers to increase awareness about products or services by presenting advertisements to social networking system users.
Presenting advertisements to social networking system users allows an advertiser to gain public attention for products or services or to persuade online users to take an action regarding the advertiser's products or services. Additionally, many social networking systems generate revenue by displaying advertisements to their users. Frequently, social networking systems charge advertisers for each presentation of an advertisement to a social networking system user (e.g., each “impression” of the advertisement) or interaction with an advertisement by a social networking system user.
Conventionally, an advertiser provides an advertisement campaign to a social networking system. The advertisement campaign often includes multiple advertisements having various advertisement creatives for presentation to social networking system users. Additionally, the advertisement campaign includes a budget specifying a total amount of compensation from the advertiser to the social networking system for presenting advertisements in the advertisement campaign and bid amounts and other information for use by the social networking system in selecting advertisements. The budget is also a maximum amount willing to be spent by an advertiser for presenting the advertisements in the advertisement campaign. Conventional social networking systems select advertisements from an advertisement campaign based on performance or expected performance of the advertisements when presented to users of the social networking system. However, this often causes a social networking system to continually select advertisements with a threshold performance, which may prevent selection of advertisements in an advertisement campaign that have received a limited amount of user interaction.